


Between the Beeps

by CGotAnAccount



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Post Season 7, SHEITH - Freeform, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 21:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16502648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CGotAnAccount/pseuds/CGotAnAccount
Summary: It comes in the quiet moments, the suffocating feeling of being so close to losing everything.S7 post crash whump





	Between the Beeps

It comes in the quiet moments, the suffocating feeling of being so close to losing everything.

Now, weeks removed, it seemed like everyone had released the stagnant fear that had been polluting their lungs, the collective exhale deafening.

Shiro still can't breathe.

If he was honest with himself he might admit this crushing weight on his chest is an old friend by now, a reminder that at least he's still capable of feeling not-quite numbing terror. After all, he can't even say it's a reminder that he was alive, being dead hadn't helped ease the constant anxiety clawing up his insides, unable to do anything as he watched death grasp at his team relentlessly. That anxiety had been thrumming through his veins in one form or another since he was first diagnosed years ago, by now the absence of it might kill him from shock.

Not that anyone noticed.

Takashi Shirogane. Garrison Golden Boy. Calm, Cool, Collected.

Never grit his teeth in public, never blew up at his team, maintained officer decorum at every turn... and the one person who knew it was all bullshit is little more than a broken doll, not worthy to bear the name of the spark that lies dormant inside the shell.

The hand resting in his own looked so delicate, nearly translucent in the fluorescent lights of the hospital. The needle taped to the back of it highlighted the long winding veins all the way up to where they disappeared into the flimsy gown, like tissue paper settled over him the scratchy cotton was barely a shade lighter than the skin underneath. The bruises mapped out over that skin were galaxies across Shiro's universe. Mottled greens and browns formed a nebula on the jaw, sickly purple swipes under the eyes he would give anything to see open.

He didn't want to think about the almost black bruises on the ribs. The sea of blood floating under the skin where the fractured bones made little islands, just waiting for a tremor to puncture something vital. The dark red that had seeped from those now pale lips, the trickle that leaked out the corner of his mouth and bubbled wetly when they first found him. Shiro had been grateful at the time for that image, though it haunts his nightmares now - it had meant the shattered body all but splattered onto the floor was breathing.

Cradling him, smashed like a broken toy, had been minutes of agony and terror that every sluggish pulse under his thumb would be the last.

Shiro shuddered and closed his eyes, trying to banish the gore of that day from his mind. At least each limb was facing the right direction now so he can almost pretend that the kaleidoscope of trauma in the shape of a man next to him is just asleep.

Either way, shock had settled in shortly after hauling the limp form of his best friend into a makeshift pod and it had not yet abated. Shiro's body may have been present at meetings, his hand may have signed forms, but his pulse might as well have been the persistent beeping from the machine near the bed. Sam had accepted that Shiro would be a dead man walking, at least until his comatose team was stable, but really even he didn't understand how true that was.

He had been there when the trauma surgeons had forced Shiro out of the operating room as they pulled the limp frame from the pod. It had taken Kinkade and Griffin tackling him and Sam's steady voice to keep him from barging back in when the machine monitoring heart rate flatlined, all he remembers is his mind going white with static before going red. Judging by the collection of bruises they each wear, his own raw throat, and the gouges on the operating door it wasn't something he would want to remember anyway.

Now the steady beeping is the only thing keeping him sane. When he can't be in the room to hear it himself the machine syncs to his arm - a steady thrum of energy to let him know the heart in question still beats.

Still, it's easy to forget why his own still beats when he sits here like this, looking into the broken face of his past, present, and future. The chest in front of him barely rising and falling, the eyelids not even twitching. They couldn't even scan for brain activity, his Galra heritage giving off enough abnormalities to make the readings useless. A shattered toy flung to earth for duty, maybe for love.

He had considered briefly what he might do if his spark never reignites, the old adage of lighting yourself on fire to keep another person warm sprang to mind immediately. Could he throw himself on the pyre in hopes that the fuel would rekindle this cold shell beside him? Maybe.

Screams into the abyss had brought Shiro himself back once or twice, but his own feral howling had gone all but unanswered as he watched them carve into the body through that glass, blood spilling onto the sterile flooring as they restitched shredded organs and forced the stubborn heart to beat again. How cruel that he could be evaporated and brought back by a plea but was forced to watch this slowly wasting caricature struggle on a ventilator.

The irony was cloying, that when he was closest to what he had wanted for so long it had been stripped from him in this way – that when he had held his entire reason for being tightly one last time, had pressed a kiss into his hair and murmured that when this was over they would talk, he would come back to him shattered into as many pieces as his own heart.

Shiro would curse his own name, would howl his self hatred into the night sky if it would bring him back, but his own breath had been stolen. He was little more than a specter in gray haunting between this room and whatever meetings required his body, wooden faced and stone hearted.

Soon he would need to be a puppet to spout pretty words about loss and hope to a world that needed to see the sun again when his sun had all but guttered out.

Shiro knew loss intimately, but he and hope were currently on either side of this bed, beeping together into the night in shared vigil.

 

**Author's Note:**

> oh no it sad!


End file.
